Thursday Sep 25, 2008

Last Friday I finally upgraded to firefox 3.0.1 on Solaris x86.
After starting it, it quickly appeared that something was wrong: Firefox 3 was apparently unable to retrieve any of the passwords I had saved with the previous Firefox 2 version!

Thursday Dec 07, 2006

I am sick - and forced to stay at home... I can't stay too long in front of my computer because it doesn't really improve my headache, but if I rotate from book to couch to computer I can still manage to stay in touch with what's going out outside while recovering, resting, and focusing on getting better.
Last week, while I was still happily walking around in good health, I attended my third watercolor
lesson.[Read More]

Friday Jun 30, 2006

A pair of swallows have elected the roof of my balcony to make their nest... I don't
know whether they are European or African swallows - or with which velocity they
actually fly - but they haven't brought me any coconut yet...

Tuesday Apr 04, 2006

This is not a Sun entry. This is not a Java entry - nor a JMX entry or an SNMP entry. It is a personal story - more on the et caetera side of things - and it has nothing to do with my professional life...

Saturday Jan 28, 2006

or The Paranoid, the Philosopher, the Cartesianist, the Poet, and the Stupid Fly.

Yesterday I was browsing on the Internet when a page banner caught my eye.
The banner featured a beautiful picture of four insects. A fly, an ant, a spider and a beautifully colored butterfly. Next to each picture was a checkbox. And the question was:

Which does not belong to the group?

I was hooked. For indeed, which doesn't belong to the group?
Having the soul of a poet, I was stricken by the beauty of the colorful butterfly. Surely, such a beautiful, fragile, and colorful insect couldn't possibly belong to the same group as the dull grey-brown nasty beasts pictured on the same page?

The butterfly it is! said I.

But as I was ready to click on the butterfly checkbox, another thought occurred
to me. I am a great fan of Woody Allen. Which insect would Woody Allen choose? The ant of course. I am no great philosopher, but philosophy is something I do feel interested in. The ant reminded me of Antz. And there's a great philosophic difference between the ant and the other three insects. The ant is the only one of the four that lives in colony - and which is not free to make an individual life. The ant would die without the colony. Surely such a big philosophic difference would take the ant apart from all the three other species on this page?

The ant it is! said I.

But as I was ready to click on the ant checkbox, I had another idea. Being an IT engineer, I also have a cartesian mind. The spider bothered me. For the spider has eight legs. The spider belongs to a whole different order: the arachnids. The spider was the greatest predator on this page. Surely, cartesianally, the spider is the one that didn't belong with the others. Left alone with the three others, and free to roam from the picture that imprisoned it, the spider would shortly spring on the other three, poison them, tie them, eat them, digest them, until only the spider would remain. Surely this sets the spider far apart from the other three?

The spider it is! said I.

But once again, I hesitated. What was the stupid fly doing there? Was I being paranoid? So far the fly was the only one for which I hadn't figured a single reason as to why it wouldn't belong to the group. I had in turn half decided for each of the other three, but not for the fly. Was that what made the fly different from the other three? That it was the only one that couldn't not belong? Wasn't that the greatest difference of all? Wasn't that the expected answer?

I grew up in the south of France - in a little town of around 20,000 inhabitants - where the name Fuchs (pronounced Foox) was uncommon enough so that 1) nobody who discovered how to spell it would ever be able to pronounce it correctly afterwards, and 2) nobody who knew how to pronounce it was ever able to spell it correctly. At that time, it was mostly a lot of fun.
Then I learned that having an unspeakable - or unspellable name, depending on which form written, or spoken, was first known by your interlocutor, was not always an advantage. For instance it can prove to be quite a hassle when dealing with administrations - who will insist on calling you by squirrel noises, and deny vehemently that your name is already registered in their database.

But when you later discover what John Updike had to say about you... ;-)))